In 1835 Danish ditchdiggers found the body of a woman in a peat bog, pinned down under wooden stakes. Her watery burial place was known locally as Gundhilde’s bog, after a legendary eighth-century Viking queen. Gundhilde, according to the tale, was on her way to marry the Danish king Harald Bluetooth when she was waylaid and drowned. Historians concluded they had found Queen Gundhilde’s body. The reigning Danish king, Frederick VI, was so impressed with the story that he arranged to have her buried in a royal coffin in a church in nearby Vejle, the ancient royal seat.
Actually the queen was considerably older than thought, and probably somewhat less than royal. More than a hundred years after her discovery, during World War II, coal shortages made peat--which, after all, is simply very young coal--a valuable fuel source, and the people of northwestern Europe began tearing up their bogs. But as peat carvers cut huge blocks out of soggy, moss-covered coastal bogs, they frequently made the shocking discovery of bodies, obviously murdered, and so well preserved they looked as if they’d only recently died. In fact they were all around 2,000 years old. Suddenly, bog bodies like that of Queen Gundhilde and a scattering of others found over the previous few centuries were no longer isolated oddities. Prehistoric murder victims from approximately the same time period kept turning up in northwestern Europe, especially in Denmark and northern Germany. For some reason, from 2,500 to 2,000 years ago, the Germanic tribes of Iron Age northwestern Europe had a habit of killing people and leaving their bodies in bogs.
Even 50 years ago, archeologists knew practically nothing of the Iron Age in northwestern Europe, having only pottery fragments and other bits of evidence to work with. And they were unable to learn much from these bodies--modern techniques of dating, preservation, and analysis were still unknown. Of the 1,000 or so bodies or body parts that have been discovered in Iron Age peat, most weren’t cared for or properly examined at the time of discovery. Today most are just paper mummies, existing only in newspaper reports and historical records. But over the past ten years researchers have taken a new look at the bog mummies that remain. They are analyzing the bodies as if they are modern-day murder victims, using the forensic methods that are employed today to identify anonymous corpses. Although the wealth of information these Iron Age John and Jane Does are yielding hasn’t yet offered a clear-cut answer to why they were killed, archeologists are getting a better sense of who these people were and how they died.
